I am proud to announce the release of an optimized version of the Falcon assembler with the help of Cyrus Proctor and Jawon Song at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The Falcon diploid assembler is an exciting tool for biological research and allows for the assembly of complex genomes in record time. The tool is currently accessible on the CyVerse Discovery Environment and will be deployed as standard module on the Stampede supercomputer in an upcoming maintenance cycle.

My preferred program for aligning bisulfite-sequencing reads to a reference is BSMAP. BSMAP is based on SOAP and aligns reads fairly quickly considering the variability that bisulfite treatment introduces. While there are other fast BS-Seq aligners (GSNAP, Bismark, BS Seeker) I prefer BSMAP because it comes with the script methratio.py to post-process the aligned reads for quick interpretation. The script parses all aligned reads and produces a tabulated output similar to VCF (Variant Call Format) which not only includes the methylation frequency, but also base representation from both strands. Below is an example of the output from methratio.py.

Today I had to make an expense report and decided to use a Google document instead of a spreadsheet so I could embed images of all receipts as I went. I knew Google documents had tables and figured that they had simple functions like SUM. They did not. What they did have was Google Apps Script found under Tools -> Script Editor. I had a hard time with the tutorials, but I’m sure this project is still maturing and might be dropped from Google’s offerings any day. However, I did manage to make a script (with a button!) that sums dollar values in a table and prints the total in the last row.

To better enable researchers to analyze their own fastq files without downloading additional software, I created FASTQA-JS. Base quality scores often drop off towards the end of a read when errors accumulate in the spots of DNA on a flowcell. It is common practice to analyze these quality scores and truncate the reads when quality scores are below a specified threshold. Below is an example of the output from FASTQA-JS.